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Saturday, 25 March
Monster Institutions
17:30 hrs. Gerald Raunig. Technecologies. Milieus, Midstreams, Monsters
18:30 hrs. Florencio Cabello. Notions of Public in Collective Intelligence
19:30 hrs. Roberta Da Soller (S.a.L.E., Venice), Kelly Mulvaney (Transform-eiPCP, Berlin and Vienna) and Manuela Zechner (Barcelona). Moderated by: Raúl Sánchez Cedillo. European Cities, from Care and Shelter to Fear, War, and Debt
21:00 hrs. Debate with the session participantsParticipants:
Florencio Cabello has a PhD in Communication Studies and is a lecturer at the University of Málaga. His teaching and research focuses on ways of forming cooperatives inspired by the free software and culture movements, under the perspective of constructing a commons in communicative and cultural domains. He is coordinator of the Medialab-Prado project Traducciones del Laboratorio del Procomún (Translations of the Commons Laboratory).
Roberta Da Soller is an activist and member of the collective which operates S.a.L.E. Docks, an independent space of contemporary art and cultural practices in Venice which has been running since 2008. S.a.L.E. Docks programmes seminars, exhibitions, research projects, workshops and public actions that seek to create an environment in which art and culture are removed from the market value logic.
Kelly Mulvaney is an anthropologist, translator and activist. She is a member of eiPCP and the editorial board for transversal texts. Furthermore, she is a professor at the Faculty for Cultural Studies at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, and actively participates in the networks of transnational anti-austerity movements in Europe.
Gerald Raunig is a philosopher and art theorist. He is a lecturer at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (Zurich), and is co-editor of eiPCP and its online publication transversal text. His most recent publications include Producción cultural y prácticas instituyentes. Líneas de ruptura en la crítica institucional (2008), Mil máquinas. Breve filosofía de las máquinas como movimiento social (2008), Fabbriche del sapere, industrie della creatività (2012), and DIVIDUUM. Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution (2016).
Raúl Sánchez Cedillo is a philosopher, activist and translator. He has collaborated with the Universidad Nómada and is currently a member of Fundación de los Comunes. He has also edited and translated theorists such as Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri, Felix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Yan Moulier-Boutang and Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello into Spanish, and some of his writings appear in the book Producción cultural y prácticas instituyentes. Líneas de ruptura en la crítica institucional (2008) and in the prefaces to different essays by Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno.
Manuela Zechner is a researcher and independent cultural worker. Her work revolves around migration, micropolitics, care and pedagogy, with an emphasis on social movements. She is the coordinator of Future Archive (Intermediae-Matadero, Madrid), the Project for Radical Collective Care Practices, alongside Julia Wieger and Bue Rübner Hansern, and the free radio programme Sounds of Movement (Radio Orange, Radio Helsinki and live streaming). She has also worked as a lecturer at the Queen Mary University of London. -
Sunday, 26 March
The Artist in the City-Brand
17:30 hrs. Rogelio López Cuenca. In the Genius City
This presentation will lead on to a workshop with the artist and Elo Vega.
18:30 hrs. Isabell Lorey. Precarization, Indebtedness, Giving Time
19:30 hrs. Debate with the session participantsParticipants:
Rogelio López Cuenca. Artist. A member of the former direct action collective Agustín Parejo School between 1982 and 1984, his work stands at the crossroads between visual poetry, archival research and public intervention, exploring the relationships between art, memory and ideology. Málaga/Guernica 951 (2017), Ciudad Picasso (2011), Malagana (2000) and Sobrevivir a Picasso (2012) are some of his projects under construction and centre on contemporary interpretations of Pablo Picasso. He has exhibited at the Museo Reina Sofía, IVAM, MACBA, MUSAC, CGAC and Artium, among other institutions.
Isabell Lorey is a professor of International Gender Politics in the Institute for Political Science at the University of Kassel. She has taught feminist and post-colonial theory at the University of Humboldt, Berlin, and at the Universities of Vienna and Basel, and is also a member of eiPCP and co-editor of its online publication transversal text. She conducts research into the precariousness of work and life in neoliberal society, social movements, democracy and representation. Her most recent publication is Estado de Inseguridad. Gobernar la Precariedad (2016).
Elo Vega is an artist and researcher. Her work addresses social, political and gender issues through art projects which are at once cultural critique devices and a political instrument. In recent years she has worked with the artist Rogelio López Cuenca in workshops and collective projects related to history, memory and monumentalization as an element of ideological control, for instance Gitanos de papel (Cultural Centre of Spain in Montevideo), Historia de dos ciudades/Saharawhy (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Chile), Efigies y fantasmas (Museo de Huelva) and Granada. Guía monumental (Centro José Guerrero).
Picasso in the Monster Institution
Art, the Culture Industry and the Right to the City
Held on 25 Mar 2017
Picasso in the Monster Institution. Art, the Culture Industry and the Right to the City strives to create distance from the predominant sense of celebrations and large-scale cultural commemorations which, in understanding art as an attractive resource, place history and artistic experience inside a frame with exclusive ties to tourism and urban leisure. It also calls into question these logics and explores possible alternatives.
This seminar unfolds inside the context of Midstream, a European network of university and institutional research into new audiences and devices of cultural mediation, comprising eiPCP (the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies), Museo Reina Sofía, and the Latvian Center for Contemporary Art, and seeks to reflect on and debate the role of culture and art in those social movements that vindicate uses of urban space outside a city model which looks towards art to strengthen tourist imaginaries, thus conditioning its institutions and reception.
The recognition of Picasso’s work is one of the best examples to analyse the contradictions and complexities of these logics. Today, the work of the artist from Málaga is broadly appreciated and disseminated, yet, equally, such a reception cements stereotypes associated with the heroic and fetichized idea of artistic avant-garde movements and their most unrelenting myths, for instance the originality, brilliance and autonomy of art. These values obscure one of the 20th century’s most complex bodies of work.
How can the contemporary city fight against this integration of art, and its audiences and institutions, in the service economy and recover the potential of one of the most challenging oeuvres from the avant-gardes in its historical scope? What are the devices and anomalous or “monstrous” institutions which are able to place the work in a space which is alien to this integration? The seminar sets out to reflect on these questions via two round-table discussions and a workshop on the monumental imagary of Picasso and the contemporary city, conducted by Rogelio López Cuenca and Elo Vega, which will begin at the close of the lectures and shall be expanded upon in the future. The first session will debate monstrous institutionalism’s modes of relationship, calling upon different European networks and spaces (S.a.L.E., Venice; Transform-eiPCP, Berlin and Vienna; and La Invisible, Málaga), and theorists specialised in testing mediation experiments with these instituent machines. The second analyses the relationship between art and gentrification through the uses and abuses of Picasso’s work, putting forward a model of artistic experience which eludes the so-called creative industries and economies.
Framework
Midstream. New Ways of Audience Development in Contemporary Art, inside the Creative Europe programme
Organised by
eipcp (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies), Museo Reina Sofía and La Invisible
Más actividades
Institutional Decentralisation
Thursday, 21 May 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
International Museum Day 2026 with Radio 3
22 MAY 2026
On Friday, 22 May 2026 the Museo Reina Sofía celebrates International Museum Day by way of a vibrant music programme conducted by Radio 3.
From 9am to 11pm, the Museo’s Nouvel Courtyard will host the live broadcast of Radio 3’s day-long programme —also available on a video streaming on the Radio3 website and app, on RTVEPlay and on the Museo’s social media accounts. The programme comprises more than twenty live acts, including artists such as Carlangas, Shego, Soleá Morente, Kokoshca, La Tania, La Pegatina, Pipiolas, Ángel Stanich, Triángulo de Amor Bizarro and Zahara, and many others.
With this programme the Museo Reina Sofía concludes its celebration of International Museum Day, which takes place on Monday, 18 May. Both on 18 May, from 10am to 9pm, and 22 May admission to the Museo will be free of charge.
Gerardo Mosquera: Island Thinker, Global Curator
19 MAY 2026
This encounter pays homage to Gerardo Mosquera (Havana, 1945), a pre-eminent curator, an essayist who has been part of key debates on decolonisation and the drifts of globalisation, a communicator and, primarily, an art critic who has managed to radically situate discourses and practices, while still taking on risks and perpetually upholding committed ethical positions.
Mosquera is one of the foremost curators internationally and was involved with the Havana Biennial from its foundation in 1984 to 1989, as well as curating pivotal shows in museums and art centres around the globe. Notable among his curatorial work is as adjunct curator at the New Museum in New York (1995–2009), the Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the exhibition It’s Not Just What You See. Perverting Minimalism (Museo Reina Sofía, 2000).
This round-table discussion, which features the participation of Gerardo Mosquerahimself and an ensemble of art critics, thinkers and artists, for instance Fernando Castro Flórez, Diana Cuéllar, Lillebit Fadraga and René Francisco Rodríguez, will approach the multifaceted and extremely fertile work of Mosquera as a renowned master curator.
Miguel Falomir, Director of the Museo Nacional del Prado, in Conversation with Museo Reina Sofía Director Manuel Segade
18 MAY 2026
Museo del Prado and Museo Reina Sofía directors, Miguel Falomir and Manuel Segade, respectively,engage in conversation on Monday, 18 May in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Auditorium 400, in conjunction with International Museum Day 2026, the theme of which is “Museums Uniting a Dividing World”. The discussion, moderated by journalist and poet Antonio Lucas, will see the two heads of these major cultural institutions share their reflections on the role they play in today’s society.
In addition to addressing the management of art, the conversation seeks to explore in greater depth museums’ potential as meeting points to face today’s social tensions, thereby fulfilling the international mandate of this year’s edition.
The activity will be live-streamed and is available at this link.